Steam for Mac: the beta is limited, but the future is bright

Steam for the Mac works well, and Valve has pledged support for its current …

Valve's not-so-subtle hints that Steam would be coming to the Mac platform were met with a great deal of enthusiasm from the wholly under-served community of gamers who own Apple hardware. It has been years of slim pickings for Mac owners.

We've been playing with the beta of the Steam service on a variety of Mac systems over the weekend, and while this may not be the Holy Grail for Mac gaming some had hoped it would be, the future is indeed brighter than it once was. Let's take a look.

The beta is barely a taste

The only game available to play in the beta so far is Portal, which isn't exactly a cutting-edge title. I was able to play fine with my Unibody MacBook Pro after chopping down a few of the graphical options and hooking up an external USB mouse. The touchpad on newer Macbooks is great for productivity, but it's not exactly optimal for gaming performance. If you're a Razer fan, be aware that there are now full Mac drivers for all their products... possibly preparing the hardware for the rollout of this very service.

MacBook Pros include two GPUs, and Steam gently reminded me that I had my system set to use only one of them for longer battery life, offering a link to my system's settings to remedy this problem. I turned on the more powerful—and battery-limited—GPU for better gaming performance. I was also asked to enable "access for assistive devices" in system preferences under Universal Access.

After that, the game worked beautifully. As anyone with a Windows partition on his or her Mac OS X systems already knows, Mac hardware is hardly going to replace any similarly priced gaming PC, but newer models certainly have the horsepower to run Source-based games at a very playable framerate, as long as you don't mind monkeying around in the graphical options to find settings that work best for your system.

What this means moving forward

With only one game available for now, the beta mainly just shows the Steam client working. Soon we'll have access to Team Fortress 2 to try out, but as that's another game based on the Source engine it's doubtful there will be much to learn from running it... outside of the fact that we can.

In fact, Valve is going to be the big winner for a while here unless other companies step up: a ported Source engine allows Portal, Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2, Half-Life 2 (and all its episodes), and Team Fortress 2 to be available for sale when the service launches. Portal 2 is another game likely to be released day and date on Macs. Valve is going to launch a service on the Mac that will be offering a good selection of its own games to a customer base hungry for titles. That's a very good position to be in.

There's the symbol!

Good news if you run Windows and Mac OS X: if you already own these games on the PC you won't have to pay for another license on your Apple computers. If you already own Left 4 Dead, you'll be able to download it again on your MacBook and play.

In fact, when the client leaves beta for wide release, a new storefront dedicated to Mac games will be available. "Once the Mac beta ends, we'll have the store up and running with a collection of your favorite Mac games and a continually growing catalog," the beta page states. "Buy games once and play them on any Mac or PC. Just look for the SteamPlay symbol when shopping." Games bearing that symbol will work on both your PC and Mac, no matter which system you bought them for.

This is what Steam is really going to bring to the table: a powerful incentive for more developers and publishers to port their games to Mac OS X. Steam has some serious momentum in the world of digital distribution, and if Valve's own games begin to sell in large numbers to Mac gamers, others will pay attention. Being able to buy a game that will work on all your PCs is a powerful value-add for gaming consumers, and this is a very good day for Mac gamers. The open question is whether more publishers will step up and take advantage of the opportunity.

Unless Steam magically increases sales and automatically makes games work on OSX, I don't see the great incentive.All it offers is another way to release games, but they still have to do some work.And on that note, I wonder if Valve will have any kind of quality control requirements for ported games like developers actually having to make them work, or patch requirements etc.

A Mac version of the Steam client does nothing for OSX gaming unless Valve try and do some enforcing, much like console developers do, otherwise people are going to be lazy.

"Good news if you run Windows and Mac OS X: if you already own these games on the PC you won't have to pay for another license on your Apple computers. If you already own Left 4 Dead, you'll be able to download it again on your MacBook and play"

This isn't good news, it how it SHOULD be. It would be bad news if they charge for another license.

In General, when you bought the first copy, your money already went to pay for the artwork, the sounds, most of the game engine, animation, marketing, legal department, etc. Since they did have to make changes perhaps a small porting fee would be reasonable such as $2 dollars to pay the game engine programmers, but you should never pay the full amount because you already paid for many things I lived above.

Unless Steam magically increases sales and automatically makes games work on OSX, I don't see the great incentive.All it offers is another way to release games, but they still have to do some work.And on that note, I wonder if Valve will have any kind of quality control requirements for ported games like developers actually having to make them work, or patch requirements etc.

A Mac version of the Steam client does nothing for OSX gaming unless Valve try and do some enforcing, much like console developers do, otherwise people are going to be lazy.

I agree that it's not the mac version of steam that will bring big developers to mac , but It could be a good opportunity for Indie developers.All those little games that sell a lot on iphone , ipad , psn, xbla, now could have another market to conquer.

I'm happy I'll be able to play Half-Life 2 again, I miss it a bit :-D It's a good thing that I won't have to buy it again (I wouldn't have), it is the way it should be, which is rare in the game industry!

I'm looking forward to this. It will be interesting to see what kind of third-party games end up showing up. I expect games that already have Mac version like World of Goo will show up. It'll be interesting to see if a robust (and popular) downloadable distribution system like Steam and the port of the Source engine will lead to better game availability.

Unless Steam magically increases sales and automatically makes games work on OSX, I don't see the great incentive.All it offers is another way to release games, but they still have to do some work.And on that note, I wonder if Valve will have any kind of quality control requirements for ported games like developers actually having to make them work, or patch requirements etc.

A Mac version of the Steam client does nothing for OSX gaming unless Valve try and do some enforcing, much like console developers do, otherwise people are going to be lazy.

TransGaming make a Windows App to Mac OS X compatibility layer called Cider (it basically simulates a Windows environment, allowing a Windows App to run on Mac OS X. Apple actually do the reverse to port iTunes to Windows, which is why it is a very slow app).It allowed game devs to simply package a windows game inside the Mac layer, and then do a few small changes and the game would run on Mac OS X. An example of a game that used this was Spore. Although mentioned nowhere on the packaging, it is mentioned on the very last page of the manual.

I'm going to be very interested to see how (if at all) the GeForce 9400M in my unibody MacBook holds up to some light gaming duties. I'm also hoping they port the original HL series at some point. I'd even buy HL:Source for that (which I've so far managed to avoid, despite owning pretty much every other Valve release).

I would hope that I don't have to monkey around with graphical settings too much. Its not like there are a lot of hardware variations on Macs. In fact it should be pretty simple for the game to access your hardware and pick the right settings for you. You would think.

I've been using my Macbook Pro as a LAN box while playing Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 on my windows partition for a long time now. You can get very good performance out of games with Mac hardware that is less than $2,500. As the article says, however, no one is going to argue these should be your primary gaming hardware.

Unless Steam magically increases sales and automatically makes games work on OSX, I don't see the great incentive.All it offers is another way to release games, but they still have to do some work.And on that note, I wonder if Valve will have any kind of quality control requirements for ported games like developers actually having to make them work, or patch requirements etc.

A Mac version of the Steam client does nothing for OSX gaming unless Valve try and do some enforcing, much like console developers do, otherwise people are going to be lazy.

Wont happen. Valve has already taken a stance of not forcing the people who want to release things through their service to do anything. Hense why games have Steam's default DRM as well as 3rd party DRM most times despite Valve saying they have a great distaste for it.

I'm going to be very interested to see how (if at all) the GeForce 9400M in my unibody MacBook holds up to some light gaming duties. I'm also hoping they port the original HL series at some point. I'd even buy HL:Source for that (which I've so far managed to avoid, despite owning pretty much every other Valve release).

I can tell you, it'll run TF2, HL2, Portal (basically anything from the Orange Box). Although I lack a Mac, I've played all those games on an Nvidia 8400GS. 8. Not 9. And without changing any settings.

I'm going to be very interested to see how (if at all) the GeForce 9400M in my unibody MacBook holds up to some light gaming duties. I'm also hoping they port the original HL series at some point. I'd even buy HL:Source for that (which I've so far managed to avoid, despite owning pretty much every other Valve release).

I can tell you, it'll run TF2, HL2, Portal (basically anything from the Orange Box). Although I lack a Mac, I've played all those games on an Nvidia 8400GS. 8. Not 9. And without changing any settings.

I would hope that I don't have to monkey around with graphical settings too much. Its not like there are a lot of hardware variations on Macs. In fact it should be pretty simple for the game to access your hardware and pick the right settings for you. You would think.

You can run many Valve games on super-entry level PCs... They have a very optimized engine. There will not need to be any messing with settings for the game, although you may need to adjust power-saving settings on the Mac.

I'm going to be very interested to see how (if at all) the GeForce 9400M in my unibody MacBook holds up to some light gaming duties. I'm also hoping they port the original HL series at some point. I'd even buy HL:Source for that (which I've so far managed to avoid, despite owning pretty much every other Valve release).

Millage will vary but not well.

Ive been gaming a bit on my Mac Mini (Early 2009) in Boot Camp because my PC fried a few months ago and it is painful. Mass Effect 2 has to run with everything off at 800x600 to get smooth framerate and L4D2 is just pointless even with everything off and running at a low rez. I can not imagine how one would play TF2 without getting completely frustrated.

Then again I am used to gaming on a Quad Core 3.0 with a GTX285 with a rez of 1920x1200 so anything less makes me cringe.

I'm going to be very interested to see how (if at all) the GeForce 9400M in my unibody MacBook holds up to some light gaming duties. I'm also hoping they port the original HL series at some point. I'd even buy HL:Source for that (which I've so far managed to avoid, despite owning pretty much every other Valve release).

Millage will vary but not well.

Ive been gaming a bit on my Mac Mini (Early 2009) in Boot Camp because my PC fried a few months ago and it is painful. Mass Effect 2 has to run with everything off at 800x600 to get smooth framerate and L4D2 is just pointless even with everything off and running at a low rez. I can not imagine how one would play TF2 without getting completely frustrated.

Then again I am used to gaming on a Quad Core 3.0 with a GTX285.

Actually, TF2 is much less graphically intensive than L4D2. In fact, you can run it on an entry-level PC.

I have a Windows 7 gaming machine in the corner but do all my work on the Mac Pro. At first I thought it would be a pretty anemic experience playing on anything without "proper" video hardware, memory and honking CPU and then I clicked on the Steam Hardware Survey.

Go take a look at what the majority of people are using and I'll give you a hint, it's certainly not the latest and greatest $400+ card from nVidia/ATI, quad core processor from AMD/Intel and/or buckets of RAM.

I'm going to be very interested to see how (if at all) the GeForce 9400M in my unibody MacBook holds up to some light gaming duties. I'm also hoping they port the original HL series at some point. I'd even buy HL:Source for that (which I've so far managed to avoid, despite owning pretty much every other Valve release).

Millage will vary but not well.

Ive been gaming a bit on my Mac Mini (Early 2009) in Boot Camp because my PC fried a few months ago and it is painful. Mass Effect 2 has to run with everything off at 800x600 to get smooth framerate and L4D2 is just pointless even with everything off and running at a low rez. I can not imagine how one would play TF2 without getting completely frustrated.

Then again I am used to gaming on a Quad Core 3.0 with a GTX285.

Actually, TF2 is much less graphically intensive than L4D2. In fact, you can run it on an entry-level PC.

We are talking about a mobility level video chip here and you need to factor in 6-30 people running around in the game as well. Being a twitch shooter lack of framerate and decent rez will hinder your gaming ability and thus make things quite frustrating.

I'm going to be very interested to see how (if at all) the GeForce 9400M in my unibody MacBook holds up to some light gaming duties. I'm also hoping they port the original HL series at some point. I'd even buy HL:Source for that (which I've so far managed to avoid, despite owning pretty much every other Valve release).

Millage will vary but not well.

Ive been gaming a bit on my Mac Mini (Early 2009) in Boot Camp because my PC fried a few months ago and it is painful. Mass Effect 2 has to run with everything off at 800x600 to get smooth framerate and L4D2 is just pointless even with everything off and running at a low rez. I can not imagine how one would play TF2 without getting completely frustrated.

Then again I am used to gaming on a Quad Core 3.0 with a GTX285.

Actually, TF2 is much less graphically intensive than L4D2. In fact, you can run it on an entry-level PC.

We are talking about a mobility level video chip here and you need to factor in 6-30 people running around in the game as well. Being a twitch shooter lack of framerate and decent rez will hinder your gaming ability and thus make things quite frustrating.

I really do think a sub $50 8800GT would smoke a 9400M any day.

I played TF2 on an 8400GS on the cheapest entry-level Dell PC with Vista...

I've been using my Macbook Pro as a LAN box while playing Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 on my windows partition for a long time now. You can get very good performance out of games with Mac hardware that is less than $2,500. As the article says, however, no one is going to argue these should be your primary gaming hardware.

Can I ask what resolution, screen size, and graphics quality settings?

iMacs have geforce 9400M, radeon 4670, and radeon 4850 according to the apple website, but those radeons are the mobility radeons.

I've put ~100 hours into Mass Effect 2 on my 27" iMac with the Mobility Radeon 4850, playing at 2560x1440 resolution with no AA and 8xAF, and all ME2 graphical settings maxed. Plays great, with the average frame rate probably 40+. Similarly, I've done two full runthroughs of Modern Warfare 2 and sunk ~140 hours into Dragon Age: Origins, again at 2560x1440, no AA, 8xAF, all game graphical settings maxed, with roughly the same results. I'm currently playing Just Cause 2 with the same settings (but with in-game motion blur disabled) and frame rates are still sticking around 40 average. I could cut some of the details or kill the AF to bump that somewhat if I were playing online and needed pure speed.

The 27" iMac + Mobility Radeon 4850 is a great gaming platform. I wouldn't buy one if gaming is your PRIME purpose--for that, you want a PC or a console--but if you've bought an iMac because you wanted an iMac, it also happens to play games pretty damn well.

I don't understand why everyone is so worried about performance. This is a six year old game engine, which was so damn efficient even back then that it would practically run on a fax machine. My friend used to play Half-Life 2 on a GeForce 4 MX440 SE... yes.

Back in 2004 when the game came out I was running the game at respectable settings on a Radeon 9600 XT, and maxing out all the settings when I got a GeForce 6800 GT. Most of my friends upgraded to GeForce 7800/7900 era cards and were running TF2 with everything turned all the way up at high resolutions.

I don't think anyone with a semi-recent iMac or MacBook Pro has anything to worry about, as long as the Source engine doesn't lose its trademark speed in the port, which is usually the product of sloppy/lazy third party ports (Doom 3...). Valve, as far as I can tell, is handling the port in-house so it should be silky smooth.

If they can make the Source engine run on the PS3, they can do anything. Not to mention the non-stop 60fps goodness they got out of the Xbox 360.

I don't understand why everyone is so worried about performance. This is a six year old game engine, which was so damn efficient even back then that it would practically run on a fax machine. My friend used to play Half-Life 2 on a GeForce 4 MX440 SE... yes.

Back in 2004 when the game came out I was running the game at respectable settings on a Radeon 9600 XT, and maxing out all the settings when I got a GeForce 6800 GT. Most of my friends upgraded to GeForce 7800/7900 era cards and were running TF2 with everything turned all the way up at high resolutions.

I don't think anyone with a semi-recent iMac or MacBook Pro has anything to worry about, as long as the Source engine doesn't lose its trademark speed in the port, which is usually the product of sloppy/lazy third party ports (Doom 3...). Valve, as far as I can tell, is handling the port in-house so it should be silky smooth.

If they can make the Source engine run on the PS3, they can do anything. Not to mention the non-stop 60fps goodness they got out of the Xbox 360.

I don't understand why everyone is so worried about performance. This is a six year old game engine, which was so damn efficient even back then that it would practically run on a fax machine. My friend used to play Half-Life 2 on a GeForce 4 MX440 SE... yes.

Back in 2004 when the game came out I was running the game at respectable settings on a Radeon 9600 XT, and maxing out all the settings when I got a GeForce 6800 GT. Most of my friends upgraded to GeForce 7800/7900 era cards and were running TF2 with everything turned all the way up at high resolutions.

I don't think anyone with a semi-recent iMac or MacBook Pro has anything to worry about, as long as the Source engine doesn't lose its trademark speed in the port, which is usually the product of sloppy/lazy third party ports (Doom 3...). Valve, as far as I can tell, is handling the port in-house so it should be silky smooth.

If they can make the Source engine run on the PS3, they can do anything. Not to mention the non-stop 60fps goodness they got out of the Xbox 360.

They didn't make it run on the PS3. EA ported it for them!

Well, that's a little more complicated. Valve worked directly on the port with a team of people who made PS3 specific optimizations at (don't quote me on this) Gearbox. Valve has actually since hired a few former Naughty Dog employees which seems to imply they'll be handling PS3 ports completely in-house. Gabe Newell actually made some comments about what a nightmare the PS3 port of The Orange Box had been for the company.

I don't understand why everyone is so worried about performance. This is a six year old game engine, which was so damn efficient even back then that it would practically run on a fax machine. My friend used to play Half-Life 2 on a GeForce 4 MX440 SE... yes.

Back in 2004 when the game came out I was running the game at respectable settings on a Radeon 9600 XT, and maxing out all the settings when I got a GeForce 6800 GT. Most of my friends upgraded to GeForce 7800/7900 era cards and were running TF2 with everything turned all the way up at high resolutions.

I don't think anyone with a semi-recent iMac or MacBook Pro has anything to worry about, as long as the Source engine doesn't lose its trademark speed in the port, which is usually the product of sloppy/lazy third party ports (Doom 3...). Valve, as far as I can tell, is handling the port in-house so it should be silky smooth.

If they can make the Source engine run on the PS3, they can do anything. Not to mention the non-stop 60fps goodness they got out of the Xbox 360.

They didn't make it run on the PS3. EA ported it for them!

Well, that's a little more complicated. Valve worked directly on the port with a team of people who made PS3 specific optimizations at (don't quote me on this) Gearbox. Valve has actually since hired a few former Naughty Dog employees which seems to imply they'll be handling PS3 ports completely in-house. Gabe Newell actually made some comments about what a nightmare the PS3 port of The Orange Box has become for the company.

There are also a metric crapton of indie games on steam that could be ported to Mac if they don't already have Mac versions (many do). My younger sister got a laptop last christmas with lousy integrated graphics but it'll still run the hell out of torchlight, the penny arcade games, puzzle quest, audiosurf, etc etc etc. I must have gifted her 10 games.